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'Whether your dreams are of the nocturnal or day variety there is plenty to enjoy on this fastidiously engineered disc; Herrick's playing is strong on ...'as ever, an enterprisingly devised selection of music, excellently performed on a pristine instrument. And, by the way, the quality of the recording ...» More

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Charles-Valentin Alkan (1813–1888) appears never to have held a post as organist (even though in 1834 the Paris Conservatoire awarded him a premier prix for the instrument). In some ways he was to the nineteenth century what Erik Satie was to the twentieth. Both were rather enigmatic figures, leading slightly odd, unconventional lives, and both wrote music which occasionally seems eccentric but which nonetheless commands its adherents’ fierce loyalty. Prière is the fifth of his Treize prières, Op 64, a collection for organ or pedal piano dating from the late 1860s. It is heard here in an arrangement by Franck, who evidently held Alkan in high regard, for it was to him that he dedicated his Grande Pièce Symphonique, and he took the trouble to arrange not only some of the Op 64 set but also some of the Onze grands préludes, Op 66. This particular Prière is based entirely on one theme, broad and chorale-like in character, which Alkan works up to a commanding climax.

The extraordinarily precocious Charles-Valentin Alkan won a Premier Prix in piano at the Paris Conservatoire at the age of eleven, and went on to take similar awards for harmony and organ. He enjoyed considerable success as a child prodigy and won the admiration of Schumann and Liszt, but for some reason he always felt himself to be in the shadow of the latter. He enjoyed the close friendship of many influential people, including Chopin and George Sand, but became increasingly withdrawn and unwilling to promote himself as either a pianist or a composer. Typical of his idiosyncratic behaviour was his decision to resign the post of organist at the Paris Synagogue before he had even taken it up, thus depriving himself of the use of a brand-new Cavaillé-Coll organ. Although the bulk of his output is for the piano – much of it requiring extremes of dexterity and stamina – he also composed several smaller-scale works for the pedal piano, an instrument for which he had a particular fondness. From the 13 Prières, Op 64, and the 11 Préludes, Op 66, both written around 1866, his friend and admirer César Franck selected ten pieces and arranged them for organ. In general the alterations he made were minor ones, consisting mostly of adjustments to the tessitura and figuration in order to make them lie more idiomatically for the organ. Prière No 11 in E major is pastoral in mood; the broader middle section bears the Nobilmente marking so beloved of Elgar.